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LOTRO and GW2: Victory from defeat

It was a very productive gaming weekend over at the Syp homestead. For starters, I buckled down and finally finished up Helm’s Deep on my Captain in LOTRO, enduring the final four epic battles and enjoying the scenery afterward (the circling carrion birds were a nice touch).

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the epic battles at all. Maybe they’re more fun with a party, but I didn’t feel that they were significantly different than skirmishes, and in many ways were worse than skirmishes (you don’t get XP per kill, for starters, and all of the epic battles are “defend this position” instead of offensive actions). I mean, they did tell the story of Helm’s Deep well and I was constantly ogling all of the scenery, but did they have to be so dang long?

Anyway, Helm’s Deep is done and my cappy is in a good spot to tackle the upcoming update. I then spent some more time on my Lore-master’s journey through her epic story. She’s already past Mirkwood and just finished the “Ranger roundup” portion of the next volume. Time to go south to Enedwaith and Dunland!

I’ve got to admit, the epic story is just so much more enjoyable when you don’t have to stop and do a thousand side quests along the way. I like side quests, especially the first time through, but sometimes you just want to continue a story uninterrupted. I feel strongly about that in relation to SWTOR as well. I know that once I get to Rohan I’ll need to do all of the quests, especially because a few of the quest lines have class trait points tied up with them, but for now I’m pretty happy to ride the epic book expressway. I’m still one level above content, so no worries on that front.

The other portion of my gaming this weekend was given, surprisingly enough, to Guild Wars 2. I’m ignoring the activities over in Lion’s Arch in favor of leveling up a fresh new Asura Necromancer and a Human Mesmer. Yes, I’m waffling between the two, trying to figure out which one will interest me the most for the long haul. It’s weird because there’s aspects of both that I like and neither has a clear advantage. But I do want to settle down with one and see if I can get back into the GW2 groove by the time the next season begins.

With the Helm’s Deep xpac, I decided to get into the mindframe of an old single-player adventure game instead of an MMO and go through the quests exactly as presented, clearing out one zone at a time before moving into the next.

The quest design and phasing require this for the story to unfold, so any urge to just meander around and explore got put aside till all the quests and epic were done.

I have a feeling that this is how to think of LOTRO from here on out. EBs don’t have any replayability value for me so I just try to get everything done once and wait for the next update.

I am really trying to follow in your footsteps and concentrate on Epics to drag my Hunter (and Cappy) out of Moria…I simply keep getting distracted…and then quest bloat quit! Whereas I am really enjoying the freedom of RK’ing the Lone lands as I can pick n choose what I want to do and never risk getting lost…When a good epic quest starts rolling it is a difficult thing to stop :)